


dad jokes

by dragonsinparis



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Christmas fic, Gen, doing my tiny part to increase the proportion of nathalie-related fic in this fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 15:02:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9390179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonsinparis/pseuds/dragonsinparis
Summary: Nathalie tries to make Adrien's first Christmas without his mother suck a little less.(Operative word: tries. Look, Gabriel Agreste didn't hire her for her holiday flair, okay?)Written (before the Christmas special) forA Little Light Zine, which is a great cause and still accepting donations for Haiti!





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this last November, and it got personal in a way I didn't expect, but it's an amazing cause and you should definitely go check out the great work everyone else did for [A Little Light Zine](http://a-little-light-zine.tumblr.com/).

Every year at Christmas, Nathalie’s father sends her a pair of socks. They are always deeply, aggressively hideous.

He usually sends something else, too, usually just as out of place - a scarf she’ll never wear, shoes in the wrong size, candy with ingredients that she is allergic to. She never tells him her true opinion of these items; she just calls him up and says thank you. He asks how she is doing, and she apologizes for not being able to take off work and come see him for the holiday. He tells her every detail he can think of about his own life, and if pressed she mentions major work accomplishments. It isn’t as if there are many social developments of note. Until, of course -

“I read an odd thing in the paper a few weeks ago.”

“Mm.”

“Did your boss’s wife really just up and disappear?”

“Um.” Technically she isn’t supposed to talk about it, but at this point everybody in the country knows about as much as anyone in the house about how and why Gabriel Agreste’s wife vanished. If she talked to her father more often she'd be surprised that it took him so long to notice; it’s been a story for months. The lack of information on the case is a story in and of itself, and Nathalie supposes that she can’t tell a secret she doesn’t know - or one the whole world does. “Yes.”

“That’s weird.”

“Yes.”

“How’s the kid taking it?”

Usually the first question she gets is what she thinks happened; people ask whether she thinks Gabriel is secretly a murderer making a suit out of his wife in the attic, or whether his wife vanished with hoards of cash and the pool boy. But Nathalie’s father just wants to know how the kid is.

“He’s...all right,” she says. How to explain Adrien? He has always been kind, and he has always been lonely. It’s just that you can see one more than the other, these days.

“Really?”

“Of course not _really_ , his mother vanished. Even if she’s okay somewhere, that doesn’t leave him with any good explanations. And his dad isn’t exactly the most comforting parent in the world under the best of circumstances. But he’s a good kid, and he’s handling it better than most adults I know would.”

(This is true. The two employees assigned to set design Gabriel’s spring collection photoshoot had had a full-blown throwing-props-at-each-other meltdown over what color flowers would best bring out the pattern on a chic pencil skirt. Some poor intern had had to shuttle the loser to the emergency room after he’d been hit in the head with a ceramic beaver. Nathalie had unceremoniously fired both employees and promoted the intern; the broken beaver head actually did get used for the shoot.)

“Well,” says her father, “I’m sure he’s grateful to have you there helping him get through it.”

*

No matter how much she rolls her father’s words around in her head, she can’t decide if he meant them sincerely or as a gentle push. Either way, they get under Nathalie’s skin and stuck between her teeth and every Christmas song starts sounding like that beaver head hitting an innocent if mostly-empty skull.

This isn’t her responsibility. It’s Gabriel’s.

But she of all people knows how he likes to delegate.

It’s not as if she doesn’t try, with Adrien. She’s no small part of why he gets to go to public school, and even in the face of his mother’s absence it’s easy to see what a difference it makes. She still feels claustrophobic thinking about the time between when his mother vanished and when they got Gabriel to agree to let him out of the house: with nowhere to go and no one to mitigate it, Adrien’s loneliness had seeped into the walls, darkened the corners and deepened the echoes in the near-empty mansion. Even Nathalie herself, who would really rather be alone nine times out of ten, had felt her skin crawling away from the void.

She likes to believe that she helped Adrien escape to school just to help a sad kid she actually sort of liked be a little happier. And part of her really did, but part of her just wanted the space to go back to her real job. And now she has her real job back again, but Adrien and his happiness are what her brain turns over on her off hours; he is a problem to be fixed, an important but unfinished task.

It is not that she does not meet or exceed any of Gabriel’s requests in regard to his son. It is that when Adrien thinks no one is looking, he still appears to be so sad.

So here she is, two days before Christmas, awkwardly asking him what he wants.

“Um,” he says. “You don’t have to get me anything.”

She knows this. She is his father’s employee. She is no longer his teacher and she was never his nanny.

But she _wants_ to. Because she knows Adrien well enough to know that he wants more than anything is for people to care enough about him to notice, to make the effort. On the other hand, he is self-conscious and unassuming enough to not want anyone to feel like they _should_ make an effort on his behalf.

“Your father wants to know,” she lies. Another thing she knows Adrien wants: virtually any attention from Gabriel Agreste.

He smiles, but it’s a bit hesitant - he can’t tell if she’s lying, and he doesn’t want to get his hopes up. “Anything he gets me will be great. I really liked that scarf he got for my birthday.”

That one’s gonna keep haunting her, apparently.

“Noted,” she says, all smooth professionalism, which is a nice cover for how uncomfortable she is. They’re both uncomfortable. Why she thought this conversation was a good idea at all is beyond her. But she still feels guilty about the whole scarf thing, so: “Is there anything I can get you? Even just something small?”

It’s a silly question, really. The boy has a climbing wall and a basketball court in his bedroom. What could she possibly get him that he couldn’t get for himself? He must be thinking the same thing because he’s looking anywhere but her - up, over her shoulder, to his left, down -

At which point, improbably, he bursts out laughing.

Adrien’s laugh is pure and unassuming sunlight, a burst of golden sound, all the more impressively pure for how rare it is. This is a boy who smiles on instinct - at least in the presence of others - but almost never laughs. Nathalie is so caught off guard that it takes her several seconds to realize that he is laughing at her.

She looks down and realizes that her slacks have ridden up enough to display the socks her father got her: koala bears riding bicycles covered in Christmas lights. This is what she gets for skipping laundry to finish up the work the beaver victim left unfinished.

She stares at Adrien, aggressively neutral, until he manages to calm down and offer up a sheepish grin. She has never been so grateful for her impeccable poker face.

“Maybe you could get me some socks like that,” Adrien offers.

She narrows her eyes.

“I’m serious!” He insists. He is still smiling, but there isn’t any mockery there.

She opens her mouth to say _I have no idea where to get socks like this, my ridiculous father buys them for me_. But her brain manages to offer up an image of how Adrien will take that, given his own father, and she closes it again.

“Be careful what you wish for,” she says instead.

*

“I need to know where you get those socks,” she says to her father.

“What socks?” He asks. She can’t see his face, of course - it will be a cold day in hell when that man learns to Skype - but she’s pretty sure he’s messing with her. That he wants her to say it.

So she does. “The deeply awful ones you send me every year with the weird stuff on them.”

She can hear the laughter in his voice. He knew all along. “If they’re so awful, why do you need to know where I got them?”

“The kid saw a pair and liked them.”

“Makes sense,” her father says. “I know his dad’s a designer and all, but the kid kind of looks like he needs something with lizards in Santa hats in his wardrobe.”

And, she realizes, he’s right. He’s completely right. Adrien had everything. But he was perpetually in need of a laugh. Her own sense of humor was pointedly lacking, but apparently her father’s was not as entirely off as she’d always thought.

It isn’t until later that she realizes Adrien’s appreciation is only lucky coincidence: that her father thinks she needs something similarly ridiculous. That she, too, is in need of a laugh. She wants to dismiss it, but a part of her warms and it isn’t her feet.

*

“I _love_ them!” Adrien says, holding the socks triumphantly aloft, after he’d finished laughing. She hadn’t been able to find lizards, but apparently crocodiles in Santa hats worked out just fine. They’d cost her three euros and she’d never seen him more enthused about a piece of clothing. Except, of course, the scarf.

The tree is beautiful, even if they’re the only two here to see it. Gabriel is all for the aesthetic of holiday parties but his wife was the one who liked the people. With her gone, Christmas Eve is just her and Adrien and a ton of candles. It’s beautiful, if a bit silly for two people. Gabriel, of course, is up in his office. He’d never come down to hang out with his son unless it was suddenly impossible for him to do work.

Which normally is the end of her train of thought on the matter but today gives her a terrible, idiotic, might-get-her-fired idea.

“I’ll be right back,” she says to Adrien.

She goes down to the basement. She is fairly certain nobody named ‘Agreste’ has ever been in the basement, although Adrien sneaks off enough to unknown locations that it’s possible he has. Gabriel’s wife was in the midst of redoing it, so it is a mess of construction unceremoniously put on pause. He clearly doesn’t want to continue without her there; it was her project. Nathalie picks her way carefully to the back, finds the fuse box, and oh-so-accidentally plunges the whole house into darkness.

It is only at this point that she realizes she forgot to bring a flashlight or even her cell phone, and has no idea how to safely navigate her way past the construction and out of the basement. So she waits, in the pitch-black. The ploy was never intended to work for long; Gabriel will already be on his cell yelling at the power company, once she doesn’t answer hers to do it for him. But hopefully he’ll at least come downstairs to the candle-filled hall and talk to his son while he waits. She’s performed more tedious tasks for the Agreste men than killing an hour or two in the dark.

Except suddenly, the dark is a little less dark.

And there is Adrien, across the huge basement at the bottom of the stairs, holding a candle and wearing those horrible socks she had bought him.

“I thought you might be here,” he says.

She gives him a little scowl.

“Dad came down,” he says, practically glowing. “I told him you were in the kitchen but I would get you. Let’s go back up. I wanna show him my socks.”

“You’re gonna get me fired,” Nathalie says.

“I actually think he could use a pair,” Adrien says.

Nathalie almost smiles, and follows him back upstairs.

**Author's Note:**

> Reminder to donate to [A Little Light Zine](http://a-little-light-zine.tumblr.com/). 
> 
> Come yell with me about Nathalie Sancoeur @dragonsinparis on tumblr


End file.
